Navigation
by SignsOfSun
Summary: One shot. Dean ponders a question he thought Sam would one day ask him.


Author: Raven Highway

Title: Navigation

Note: This is just a quick and very simple one shot. I had this floating in my head for while and after rewatching the pilot eppie I finally took the time to jot it down real quick. I have some other fics on the drafting table too and hopefully will get them out over the summer, all goes well with other writing.

_Navigation_

You never asked me, Sammy. I always expected you to. I was constantly on guard in anticipation of it, even when deeply engaged in whatever was going on, some microscopic fraction of my mind was on the watch for its arrival. But you never asked me. I never heard your voice speak those words that I know my heart would try so powerfully to resist lying about. Cause you see, that was my plan after all, all else fails, lie your ass off. A faintly disturbing second nature to me. But things are what they are.

"Why'd you come back?" are the simple words you would have put together in a terrifying string. Somehow I knew it would be those particular words. Out of that vocabulary riddled head of yours, you wouldn't even give me a fighting chance, by selecting words that I could either profess or feign ignorance of their meaning and then promptly dismiss the whole thing with a wisecrack, a very clever one of course. A wisecrack being just enough time to…escape. Out the door, or into the car, or even just a few steps in stride ahead…or some other option of the thousands of escape plans I've perfected over the years.

You agreed that we were, "a hell of a team back there", but declined the offer, the hope filled suggestion embedded in it. I'm sorry, that was the best I could do in the asking of something so huge. I knew even as I asked it that the size of what I was asking would mean giving up all you worked to build for yourself, all on your own. Asking you to turn away from that doorway to your "future on a plate", asking you to get back in that car with me and become my partner in this dark hunt, would mean leaving behind something you had longed for. Something full of light, instead of the everything that was so tainted with blackness that you fought to get free of.

Even as my voice hit the air in the asking, guilt, guilt at my selfishness, gripped me.

A part of me wished I hadn't given in to the desire, the need. That part was torn, roughly jerked, in the opposite direction by a force more intense, a factor that must be watched out for because it clouds judgment and that distortion can be costly in our line of work.

My heart begged you silently to slip back into the passenger seat beside me. All the while my mind chanted inside its own confines for you to stand strong and send me away. If you said yes, you'd go, my heart wouldn't shatter. If you said no, my mind would gratefully reflect that it was for the best, if it only kept you out of certain harm's way by a mere ounce, for one single second longer.

And you stood strong, although I would have sworn there was a hesitation there inside your expression, inside those endlessly deep eyes of yours. Perhaps that was an illusion, some creation of a weaker part of me. You chose the door to your home with Jess and not the door to the closest thing I have to a home, the Impala.

So I turned back to the wheel and drove away before you could see the shredding of my heart rise to the surface and display on my features.

It was for the best after all, right? To force you back out into the life of a hunter out of my own pathetic reasons, poorly disguised as the importance of finding dad, would have been…not right.

In all this time, you never asked me. Not in all those long miles in the car, not crashing all those exhausted nights in hotel rooms, not even the most serious of moments. The days, the weeks, the months passed and one day fairly recently I retired the watchtower I'd maintained inside my head for the moment you would bring it up. It was time. You weren't one to wait that long to ask, you enjoy torturing me way too much with these types of questions to wait longer than ten minutes tops.

And, now here I stand, unprepared for it as the words float in the air between us in a whisper.

"Why'd you come back?"

I'm your big brother and I'm supposed to have all the answers, the right ones, and I feel like I disappoint you when I don't. So now there is a silence between us. Has been for the passing of a very long string of seconds, or is it actual minutes, while I stand here, staring intensely at a map of Wyoming. I analyze every line, every crossroad, and Wyoming doesn't provide a good route. Damn state. But the sudden racing of my heart at the question's arrival to my ears begins to distort the images of the design laid before me.

The road I've been searching for can't be mapped out.

It's the internal compass that guides me.

And now for the first time I know why my plan had always been to lie. It wasn't simply because that has become second nature, force of habit. It's because that comes from following my head and not my heart. It was because I wasn't really sure of the answer myself. Not until now anyway and somehow being caught unguarded it is able to invade me.

You repeat the question, not really more insistent, simply in that way you do, hopeful. Hopeful that your big brother has the answer to patch a piece of your mind or heart.

"Why'd you come back? Why'd you come back after you dropped me back at my place at Stanford? When you…pulled me from the fire?"

You pause, weighing whether to add the last excruciating piece or not, afraid it'll push me over the edge into anger and not answering at all.

"How did you know? Why'd you come back?"

Turning my head to my left shoulder I look over at you and that lost expression only a little brother can wear draws the words of the answer, faintly from my lips.

"Always follow your internal compass, Sammy. I followed my true north."

"True north?" you barely breath out. I feel a faint undeniable smile wash over my face as I answer with the truth.

"You needed me."

The End


End file.
